Do you use a mirror when you animate?

Throughout the years professional animators have used mirrors to capture facial expressions, even the use of full body mirrors to capture all of the characters movement to assist them in their animation. The mirror is a very important tool for animators. Some might say an animators job is easy, and they just make it all up in their head. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Since the dawn of traditional animation animators have used mirrors to help them with their animation, not just to make funny faces but as reference for mouth shapes, eye expression, hair movement, body language, anything the animator could get out of their own acting ability.

In this day and age many animators will use devices that can record themselves, such as an iPhone, iPad, webcam, or video recorders. Then simply just import the video into the program of their choice then use the key frames or extreme poses that work best for them or print them out and use them as a guide when animating on paper. Which is called, “Photo Stats”. Below you will find some of the Animation Masters using mirrors and having a FUN time doing it!

The Author

Lavalle Lee

Lavalle has been making animated online cartoons since 2001 for his website flashcartoons.org. In 2009 Lavalle started learning from Don Bluth in his hand-drawn animation classes, as well as attending his Masterclasses in Arizona. In 2011 he started this website after seeing most animation sites were about all types of animation, not any specific to classical hand drawn animation. Lavalle also is the host of the popular online series. "The Traditional Animation Show". Lavalle is currently working for Don Bluth Films as a Production Manager and helped champion Dragon's Lair: The Movie Indiegogo crowd-funding campaign.

Not just animation- making faces when you’re drawing comics and storyboards is very helpful when you want a character’s expression to be really genuine. It’s like method acting! I think I learned this from Erik Wiese. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEklyiK0qWU